Italy/Tunisia Extension
of humanitarian residence permits to put an end to "emergency"
- problems including
"disappeared" Tunisians and rightless refugees from
Libya persist

On 16 May 2012,
the "technical" government's interior minister, Anna
Maria Cancellieri, announced that thousands of six-month temporary
residence permits for humanitarian reasons issued mostly to Tunisians
in response to the influx into Italy during the so-called "Arab
Spring" would be renewed for a second time, for a further
six months. A prime ministerial decree was adopted for this purpose
the day before.

The permits were originally granted through a prime ministerial
decree issued on 5 April 2011 within the framework of a "state
of emergency" concerning the influx of migrants from north
Africa that was declared on 12 February 2011 until the end of
the year, and renewed on 6 October 2011 to last until the end
of 2012. The 5 April decree on these permits set eligibility
criteria that included the date of arrival (between 1 January
and 5 April 2011), possession of documents, and neither being
banned from Italy due to a past expulsion order nor being considered
"dangerous" as a result of past convictions or behaviour.
Most of the permits were issued to Tunisians, as the dates included
in the decree covered the period when most of the people fleeing
unrest in north Africa were arriving from Tunisia (a government
estimate from August 2011 set the figure at 24,854), excluding
thousands of migrants who arrived later from Libya (estimated
at around 23,890) and Egypt. The residence permits were then
renewed on 6 October 2011 for a further six months.

Describing the measure as a way "to end the immigration
emergency by the end of the year with maximum respect for people's
rights", as it is unsustainable, particularly "in view
of the economic crisis", Cancellieri explained that ongoing
dialogue with regional councils will allow the ministry to "verify
how many migrants have received humanitarian permits" and
the state of play in procedures that are underway. It will then
be possible to adopt measures to end the emergency, which is
an important development in view of the way in which states of
emergency have been called repeatedly in this field in Italy
during the last decade to enable "extraordinary" measures
to be adopted outside of the limits set by national laws and
regulations, with an important economic impact (see Statewatch
vol. 21 no. 3, or Statewatch analysis no. 165).

A further concern is that over 20,000 people who fled to Italy
from Libya during the armed conflict were excluded from the scope
of these temporary humanitarian residence permits, although the
situation in Libya is far from settled. Since November 2011,
over 11,500 people have signed an appeal calling for asylum seekers
who have come from Libya to be granted residence permits for
humanitarian reasons, which stresses that this contingent includes
nationals of several countries (including Somalia, Eritrea, Ghana,
Nigeria, Mali, Chad, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Bangladesh and Pakistan).
The appeal ("Right to choose - Petition for the issue of
residence permits to asylum seekers from Libya") stresses
that their reception was organised separately from the circuit
of reception for the protection of asylum seekers and refugees,
and warns that they are all liable to become "irregular"
although they were threatened or underwent torture and bombings
in the north African country. Moreover, some of them who have
lodged asylum applications are receiving rejections that will
be very expensive to appeal.

Immigration flows and returns

In a hearing before the Senate's human rights committee on 16
May 2012, Cancellieri provided immigration data including a substantial
decrease in arrivals by sea compared to 2011, with 1,056 people
landing so far in 23 operations, and 22,643 removals from the
national territory, enacted "very scrupulously and correctly,
respecting rules of conduct, including international ones",
between April 2011 and April 2012.

Cancellieri spoke of the
case of two Algerians who were photographed while their mouths
were taped with a surgical mask secured with masking tape and
hands in plastic cuffs with Velcro on the Alitalia flight on
board of which they were being deported from Rome to Tunisia
on 17 April 2012. She argued that the border police's efforts
"cannot be tarnished" by an "isolated case"
for which "I have recognised a lack of attention to people's
dignity in a recent appearance in parliament". In fact,
she noted that "The use of masking tape appears improvised
and does not correspond with any of the coercive measures envisaged
at a European level as well and, in any case, it is perceived
in collective conscience as offensive to people's dignity".
She went on to explain the official version of how this came
to pass: "the officers decided to use surgical masks to
prevent efforts to spit the blood that came out of their lips,
that they had started biting, a self-harm practice that foreigners
often resort to to obstruct expulsion operations".

Further developments reported by the minister included an imminent
decision, following an inspection, on whether to maintain Lampedusa's
status as not being a "safe port" for those who arrive
by sea, a decision that was used to block arrivals after tensions
on the island on 20 September 2011 when some Tunisians set a
fire and broke out of the island's Contrada Imbriacola CPSA (early
assistance and reception centre, see Statewatch analysis no.
154).

Cancellieri also noted that sea patrols, "which have been
a useful deterrent for indiscriminate arrivals in the past, are
a mechanism to which we may resort if necessary". However,
critics including Fulvio Vassallo Paleologo of the Associazione
di Studi Giuridici sull'Immigrazione (ASGI) and Palermo University
have continued to report the practice of summary returns to Egypt.
The framework is that described by the then interior minister
Roberto Maroni in parliament on 7 April 2011, whereby:

"we have developed
a series of initatives to block the influx and to enact repatriations.
We have reinforced understandings that were already valid with
Egypt. Only a few Egyptian nationals arrived, but the bilateral
agreement with Egypt works perfectly: Egyptian citizens arrive,
they are immediately recognised by the consular authorities and
they are repatriated on the next day".

Paleologo notes that this
is a "terrible sign of continuity" with the previous
government and flies in the face of the European Court on Human
Rights ruling on 23 February 2012 in the Hirsi et al vs. Italy
case concerning collective refoulements at sea towards Libya.
The Strasbourg court found Italy guilty of violating arts. 3
("No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or
degrading treatment or punishment") and 13 (right to an
effective remedy) of the ECHR and art. 4 of Protocol 4 to the
ECHR that forbids the collective refoulement of migrants. Moreover,
in September 2011, UNHCR had criticised conditions in the CPSA
in Pozzallo (Sicily), where similar summary return practices
were enacted, stressing that it had been unable to contact the
people held there to find out whether there were any asylum seekers
among them.

Vassallo Paleologo refers to recent cases including that of a
fishing boat that arrived in Mazara del Vallo (Sicily) on 2 May
2012, whose passengers were "segregated" in a football
pitch set up as a reception camp with tents where they were recognised
by Egyptian consular staff as Egyptian nationals before all of
them, except for those identified as minors (again, inaccurate
summary identification methods were used), were flown back to
Egypt from Palermo on the following morning. In spite of being
part of the interior ministry-funded Praesidium project to guarantee
the rights of migrants who arrive, UNHCR and IOM staff were denied
the possibility of contacting them or finding out whether there
were any asylum applicants, a possibility which would have been
further undermined by the presence of Egyptian consular staff.

Lawyers were unable to hear from them and judges did not exercise
the role that is assigned to them in ordering expulsions on an
individual basis, if due procedure is followed. An interior ministry
press statement explained that all of those returned had already
been identified in Italy and expelled in the past, making any
further checks unnecessary. Vassallo Paleologo notes that this
"justification seems a lie" and that it seems "strange"
that none of the adults sought protection and all of them had
already been identified and expelled in Italy. Moreover, it would
not mean that due procedure can be replaced by arbitrary expulsions
enacted by the police. He noted that a similar operation, following
exactly the same modalities, took place a few days earlier in
Licata, near Agrigento, in Sicily.

Missing Tunisians

In relation to the 2011 arrivals from Tunisia, there has been
an ongoing campaign by relatives of migrants who embarked during
the crisis, between March and May 2011, never to resurface.

Cancellieri explained that the case is "very significant
at a human level", but that despite "intense contacts
with Tunisian diplomatic authorities" in order to track
them, including the use of fingerprints, the Italian police had
only recorded the presence of eight of them out of 142 on Italian
territory. To make matters worse, only one of these records was
recent, from after their supposed departure, whereas seven others
were from much earlier. Cancellieri only spoke of 142 people
whose fingerprints were received, whereas the complaint lodged
with the Rome courts by two associations (ASGI and ARCI) alongside
some of their relatives, refer to 270 Tunisians who have disappeared.

Relatives travelled to Italy to learn about the fate of the disappeared,
and have run a campaign called "Da una sponda all'altra:
vite che contano" (From one shore to other: lives that matter)
and organised several sit-in protests, on one occasion simultaneously
outside the Tunisian embassy in Rome and the Italian embassy
in Tunis on 30 March 2012. One mother has set herself alight
and two others tried to commit suicide in response to a lack
of answers from both sets of authorities. They complained that
they had not received any answers after a year from their departure,
whereas they had received calls from the boats stating that they
were arriving, and some parents thought they had seen their relatives
in Italian news programmes. They met Italian immigration authorities
on 11 April 2011, who told them checks would be run on the 142
sets of fingerprints that they had received, adding that 112
sets had already been sent previously about which they had not
had any news.

The latest statement from the "Venticinqueundici" (25
11) a feminist campaign that is working alongside the Tunisian
mothers and relatives, dated 28 May 2012, complains about the
lack of progress in providing them any answers, although they
had sent appeals to both the Italian and Tunisian authorities
a long time ago, in October 2011. Months of mobilisations in
both countries resulted in some meetings with authorities, but
few answers. In March 2012, they were informed by the Italian
authorities that they had received the sets of fingerprints sent
from Tunisia. After the umpteenth disappointment of being told
the outcome of the checks was negative when they were in Tunisia,
the campaign's press release notes that, after many "false
truths and half-truths":

"if we wished... to start from a fact that is certain,
we could just state the only truth that cannot be ignored: the
EU and Italian governments' immigration policies, with Tunisia's
complicity in this case, are policies of death and disappearance".

The statement notes that answering the Tunisian mothers' and
families' queries would have required the representatives of
these policies to acknowledge their responsibilities for the
"men and women who disappear". They will not do this
because it would entail an in-depth review of the "creed"
on which this policy is based, acknowledgement that the "world
belongs to everyone" and that "freedom of movement
cannot be exclusively reserved to one part of humankind".
In concrete terms, they ask for Tunisian and Italian authorities
to jointly announce the results of the fingerprint tests (mentioning
the names in each case/list), and call for an in-depth investigation
into the telephone data of their communications to confirm where
they were when they called home. It has "absurdly"
not been carried out yet and the campaigners argue that it could
unveil lots of relevant information, considering that the relatives
handed in information including their telephone numbers and the
approximate time of the calls they received. Finally, they would
like to be able to identify their relatives from the footage
of television news programmes that they saw when it was broadcast
during the crisis, which is another aspect that they are surprised
was not dealt with previously.

No quota for 2012

Minister Cancellieri also stated that the quotas that are issued
on an annual basis to set the number of non-EU nationals who
will be allowed into the country to work would not be issued
as a result of the high level of unemployment in Italy. A previous
measure was approved to regulate the entry of 35,000 seasonal
workers on 13 March 2012, exclusively from the following list
of countries: Albania, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Croatia, Egypt, the Philippines, Gambia, Ghana, India, Kosovo,
F.Y.R. of Macedonia, Morocco, Moldova, Montenegro, Niger, Nigeria,
Pakistan, Senegal, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Ukraine and Tunisia. This
form of "reserved" quotas using nationality as the
key criteria were introduced as a bargaining tool to negotiate
repatriation agreements and those for cooperation in stemming
immigration flows into Italy. In this year's case, the country
preference is exclusive, whereas it previously covered a portion
of the places allowed for lawful entry. A further 4,000 places
were allocated to people who have undergone officially approved
training programmes in their countries of origin as preparation
to enter the Italian labour market. The failure to set this quota
for 2012 means that "economic migrants and asylum seekers
alike have no other possibility than that of trying to enter
[Italy] illegally", noted Vassallo Paleologo in his analysis
on Egypt (above).

&COPY; Statewatch ISSN 1756-851X.
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